PR Disaster David Lowman Just Got Fired From JPMorgan

JPMorgan has finally made an internal change in its mortgage
department, after months of the firm receiving tons of
negative press about their foreclosure practices.

First the firm found 56,000 foreclosures its employees
didn't even read before putting the homes into foreclosure.

Then stories like this one started popping up: A
henchman hired by JPMorgan broke into the home of a woman who
says she was 3 months late on payments but was never warned of a
foreclosure (reportedly, the bank had thought it was abandoned,
even though she'd been paying electricity bills, etc). There were
others like it.

Then JPMorgan foreclosed on the homes of U.S.
soldiers. Soldiers in active duty are protected from
foreclosure by law; a bank can't convict you while you fight for
the country. Chase had foreclosed on 27 soldiers anyway.

The firm's CEO, Jamie Dimon,
immediately apologized for the illegal foreclosures and
initiated a few programs designed to help soldiers and veterans
(including
a multi-million settlement for the 27 soldiers who were
wrongly foreclosed on). That helped.

And THEN in June, a JPMorgan mortgage borrower, Tom Collette,
told
the Huffington Post a heart-breaking story about his son
Aaron, a solider, who had been fighting for the country in Iraq
when his squad was hit with an explosive device. (Luckily no one
was harmed.)

After the scare, the soldiers got to pick a destination for a
temporary leave from war and Aaron chose home, where he's headed
in August. Unfortunately, his house might not be there when he
arrives. JPMorgan is foreclosing on it, because while the bank
enacted several measures to ensure that another soldier doesn't
get wrongly evicted, it didn't look out for the soldier's
families.

When he first asked for help in 2008, he had not missed any
payments. At the time, his mortgage was being handled by
Washington Mutual, a subprime lending specialist Chase purchased
in the fall of 2008. Collette said WaMu told him he would only
qualify for a loan modification if he missed two of his $1,100
monthly mortgage payments. So he missed the payments. And the
bank began trying to foreclose on him.

“Dave Lowman and I have decided he will leave the firm,” Frank
Bisignano, the head of home-lending, said today in an internal
employee memo obtained by Bloomberg News.

JPMorgan has been taking steps this year to repair its mortgage
unit, which posted at least $3.3 billion in losses during the
first quarter. Lowman, 54, who ran home-lending since leaving
Citigroup Inc. (C) in 2006, was directed in February to start
reporting to Chief Administrative Officer Bisignano, 51. The New
York-based bank then hired Cindy Armine, Citigroup’s chief
compliance officer, last month to increase oversight as chief
control officer of home-lending.

You might remember Dave Lowman as the guy who told homeowners,
"Come to me," and then "ran
like a dog with his tail between his legs," when 50
homeowners approached (mobbed) him during a hearing about
foreclosure practices, according to someone who was there.